Friday, October 23, 2015

... during the course of [Haj Amin al-]Husseini’s meeting with Hitler in Berlin in November 1941, Hitler told the Arab leader of his plan to eradicate European Jewry.

Husseini told Hitler that he would support the Nazis, and rally the Arab world to their side, if Hitler agreed to two conditions:

that Hitler support his bid to rule over a postwar Arab state comprised of present-day Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Israel; and

that Hitler support the genocide of Middle Eastern Jewry.

As both the official Nazi record and Husseini’s summary of the meeting in his diary report, Hitler accepted Husseini’s demands.

And it makes sense that he did.

Husseini proved his loyalty to the Nazis long before he arrived in Berlin. His romance with them began with Hitler’s election victory in 1933. From then on, Husseini’s followers in Mandatory Palestine greeted one another with the Nazi salute. Swastikas festooned their towns. The Nazis began directly funding Husseini’s terror war against the Jews of Israel and British Mandatory officials in 1937.

In 1937, the British forced Husseini to flee the country. In 1941, he organized and incited a pro-Nazi military coup in Iraq. The British were forced to invade Iraq in response to the coup.

Husseini then fled to Rome where he met with Mussolini and went on the Berlin, where he remained for the duration of the war.

As the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Husseini invented and shaped the Palestinian national ethos in a manner that aligned with his pathological hatred of the Jews. Rather than providing the Palestinian Arabs with a positive vision of a future state that would safeguard and cultivate them as a distinct Arab nation, he shaped Palestinian society as a wholly negative phenomenon. It was seeded in a hybrid hatred of Jews that fused Koranic hostility to Jews with racism-based annihilationist European anti-Semitism rooted in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which Husseini translated and published in Arabic.

The goal of Husseini’s nationalist drive was not to form a Palestinian Arab state, but to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state and to annihilate all aspects of the Jewish national liberation movement through a campaign a terror and political warfare.

Husseini’s goal of leading an Arab state that encompassed Iraq and the entire Levant shows that the founding father of the Palestinian national project did not view “Palestine” as a distinct territorial entity.

After Hitler agreed to both of Husseini’s conditions, Husseini began his active collaboration in the Nazi war effort. He participated in the Holocaust directly. In 1943, he formed the SS Handschar Division comprised of Bosnian Muslims. His troops exterminated 90 percent of Bosnia’s 14,000-member Jewish community.

Husseini used his position as well to scuttle British attempts to trade German prisoners of war for Jews. In one such documented episode, in 1943 Husseini appealed to SS commander Heinrich Himmler to cancel a deal to exchange 4,500 Jewish children and 500 Jewish adults from Hungary, Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria to cancel the deal and send the Jews to Auschwitz.

Himmler bowed to his appeal. The Jews were sent to the gas chambers.

...Beginning shortly after his meeting with Hitler and extending through the end of the war, Husseini broadcast regular programs to the Arab world on Nazi short wave radio in Arabic. In those broadcasts he engendered support for the Nazis and the extermination of world Jewry. Using the mix of Islamic Jew-hatred and European annihilationist anti-Semitism he had developed in Jerusalem, Husseini cultivated a culture of support for the annihilation of Jews and the destruction of the Jewish (then nascent) state in the Land of Israel. That culture, bred through those broadcasts heard regularly by millions throughout the entire Arab world, still holds today.

Husseini was indicted as a war criminal in Nuremberg. Rather than try him, the allies allowed him to flee to Egypt in 1946. There he was greeted as a war hero by King Farouk.

...Through his terror war against the Jews and the British Mandatory authorities, and through his incitement of pro-Nazi sentiment in Egypt, Iraq and the Levant, Husseini convinced the British to betray their legal obligation to allow free Jewish immigration to the Land of Israel and so closed off the Jews’ last avenue of escape from Nazi-dominated Europe.

... Husseini is revered and glorified by the Palestinians. Yasser Arafat claimed that he was Husseini’s political heir and blood relative as a means of legitimizing his claim to leadership over the Palestinians.

Hamas as well has invoked Husseini as its ideological founding father....From the time of Husseini till today, propaganda and terror have been the Palestinians’ weapons of choice in their war against the Jews. Internally lies are spread of nonexistent Jewish plots and imaginary acts of aggression, to incite and solicit the murder of Jews. Propaganda and lies are then used to glorify the murderers as heroes and martyrs.

Externally, the Palestinians spread lies about Palestinian victimhood at the hands of bloodthirsty Jewish settlers and security forces who seek to drive the Arabs from their homes. By casting themselves as victims to the outside world, the Palestinians ensure that Israeli responses to their acts of aggression are perceived as acts of aggression, which they are fully justified in attempting to defy through murderous rampages against Jews.

The Palestinians recognize that for their terror to be acceptable to the West, they must portray themselves as guileless victims. Hence, they repeatedly insist the absurd claim that terrorists who deliberately kill Jews by running them over, are really merely victims involved in traffic accidents. The Palestinian teenage girl who this week sought to infiltrate the community of Yitzhar with a carving knife, suffers from “sleepwalking.”

These ridiculous lies are only credible in a world devoid of any historical knowledge of the Palestinians’ 95-year history of aggression against the Jews. And so the Palestinians have invented a false history of their war against Israel in which thousands of years of Jewish history is blotted out, and thousands of years of Palestinian history have been invented out of whole cloth.

In this revised version of events, Husseini has been erased from history. His role in the Holocaust has been deleted. The fact that the goal of the Palestinian national movement from its inception has been to annihilate the Jewish state and that the annihilation of Israel remains its goal still today has similarly been washed out of the history books and the news pages.

To maintain this fictional account of current and historical events, the Palestinians depend on the collaboration of the Western media.

And with each passing year, that collaboration has grown more open, expansive and shameless.

Western reporting on the events of the day now are almost entirely devoid of any relationship to reality.

Consider just a few recent examples. CNN’s report of the Palestinian arson assault on Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus on October 16 contained no mention of the fact that the fire at the holy Jewish site was set by Palestinians. In the same report, the network stated, “In the past month, eight Israelis died in 30 attacks involving knives and other weapons.”

As if fires set themselves and angry knives wander the streets.

MSNBC’s reporter Ayman Mohyeldin was caught lying two weeks ago as he claimed that the knife-wielding Palestinian terrorist in the Old City of Jerusalem who was lunging toward security personnel as they killed him, was an unarmed, innocent bystander. As Mohyeldin spewed his lies, the video of the assault that clearly showed the terrorist wielding a knife was being broadcast to his viewers.

That embarrassment didn’t stop MSNBC from maintaining the myth of Israeli aggression, however.

The next week, the network posted a graphic of British Mandatory Palestine from 1946 which it claimed was the State of Palestine in 1946. The graphic them purported to show how the Jews stole ever more Palestinian land in the years that followed. Although the network was forced to broadcast a retraction, the lie that Palestine once existed had already been told.

Then of course there was The New York Times with its stunning “background” piece purporting to provide its readers with historical context regarding the competing Israeli and Palestinian claims regarding the Temple Mount. The Times reported as fact the false claim that there is a debate among respected academics regarding whether the Jewish temples were actually located on the Temple Mount.

In other words, the Times unabashedly participated in the Palestinian project of rewriting history in a manner that erases Jewish history from the Jewish homeland....

Tuesday, October 20, 2015

Abbas: ‘We Welcome Every Drop of Blood Spilled in Jerusalem’

Palestinian leaders have created a culture of death that is motivating the latest violent terrorism.

Pallestinian-Arab leader Mahmud Abbas, Oct. 6.

Photo: Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

The latest surge of Palestinian[-Arab] terror attacks against Israelis has come in the immediate wake of explicit calls by the Palestinian [Arab] leadership to “spill blood.” This well-orchestrated campaign of violence follows many years in which Palestinian[-Arab]children have been taught to idolize the murder of Jews as a sacred value and to regard their own death in this “jihad” as the pinnacle of their aspirations.

Such violence has deep roots. It goes back to the rampages at the behest of Haj Amin al-Husseini, a Muslim activist and at one point grand mufti of Jerusalem, in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s. It continued with the fedayeen Palestinian[-Arab] militants in the 1950s and ’60s, and evolved into the terrorism of the Palestine Liberation Organization and Fatah under Yasser Arafat and now Mahmoud Abbas.

Anyone who claims that Palestinian[-Arab] terror against Jews dates only to 1967, or is a response to Israeli settlements, should become more informed of the conflict’s history.

Yet the apathy shown by the international community to the death-culture fostered by Palestinian [Arab] elites, and the unbalanced manner in which subsequent violence is often treated by the international media—as if there is any kind of symmetry between terrorists and their victims—is doing long-term, and possibly irrevocable, harm to generations of Palestinian [Arab]s.

A few recent examples underscore the depth of the problem.

Mr. Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president, said the following on Palestinian[-Authority] television on Sept. 16:

“We welcome every drop of blood spilled in Jerusalem. This is pure blood, clean blood, blood on its way to Allah. With the help of Allah, every martyr will be in heaven, and every wounded will get his reward.”

Two weeks later, on Oct. 1, Palestinian[-Arab] terrorists murdered an Israeli couple, Eitam and Naama Henkin, in cold blood in front of their four children, who ranged from 9 years old to 4 months.

Days later, with the Henkin children still in mourning, PLO official Mahmoud Ismail went on official Palestinian[-Authority] television, PBC, and proclaimed their parents’ murder to be a fulfillment of ...“national duty.” He was one of several Palestinian[-Arab] officials who condoned the murder.

Such statements strike a resonant chord among generations of Palestinian[-Arab] children who have been taught that Jews are the descendants of “barbaric monkeys” and “wretched pigs” (a phrase from a poem repeatedly recited on PBC television, to the applause of children.) They have been taught that “armed conflict” (a common Palestinian[-Arab] euphemism for the murder of Jews) against “the so-called State of Israel” is both a religious duty and an act purportedly legitimized by the United Nations—a falsehood repeated in a number of 12th-grade Palestinian[-Arab] textbooks.

The Palestinian Authority also pays handsome stipends to terrorists and their families, which serve as a powerful incentive to carry out acts of terror.

Is it surprising, then, that Mr. Abbas’s explicit call for “blood on its way to Allah” has resulted in a surge of stabbings and other attacks against Israelis? Is it any wonder that viewers of official television recently were treated to the sight of a Palestinian[-Arab] boy, dressed up in battle fatigues, telling a smiling talk-show host of his wish to become an engineer “so that I can build bombs to blow up all the Jews.”

The unending stream of blood-drenched caricatures and video clips that circulate virally through Palestinian[-Arab] social media is a telling indication of how profoundly the worship of violence is entrenched in Palestinian[-Arab] society. So are the many schools, city squares and sports tournaments named for arch-terrorists.

The cultivation of this culture of death is having devastating effects. As Palestinian[-Arab] terror touches more Jewish families, Israelis, especially of the younger generation, are increasingly resigning themselves to the fact that Palestinian [Arab] society is guided by a dramatically different set of values.

Israeli society and Jewish tradition sanctify life. Palestinian[-Arab]society glorifies death. Israeli children grow up on songs of peace and the biblical vision of “nation shall not lift up sword against nation.” Palestinian[-Arab]children are taught to hate.

Yet there is no international outcry. No indignation at the exploitation of Palestinian[-Arab]children from all the nongovernmental organizations and U.N. agencies that profess to monitor human-rights abuses.

This is tragic because the international community could make a practical difference. About a third of the Palestinian Authority’s budget is financed by foreign aid. This money is intended to develop Palestinian[-Arab]infrastructure and foster economic growth, but it is being misused by the Palestinian Authority to promote the murder of Jews and to sow destruction within Israel. The international community can wield its influence toward a cessation of incitement.

Turning a blind eye to the enormous harm that the Palestinian[-Arab] leadership is doing to its own people—by raising successive generations of children on blind hatred of the Jews and Israel—is dooming these children to a bleak future. This ought to be a compelling reason for the international community to seriously rethink the strange tolerance it exhibits toward the Palestinian[-Arab]death-culture.

Changing this culture of death is no less important for the Palestinian [Arab]s than for Israel.

Monday, October 19, 2015

With Israelis being steadily picked off for murder by knife, stone, bomb or bullet, many in the world have Jewish blood on their hands.Mahmoud Abbas: promulgates lies with bigotry and incitementBeyond the attackers themselves, the bloody trail first leads to those inciting them to murder: Mahmoud Abbas and his Palestinian Authority, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and that terrorist group’s state backer Iran, whose supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, has called for the “arming of the West Bank.”Abbas and his henchmen have repeatedly incited, sanitized and glorified the current attacks on Jews.

They have been whipping up religious hysteria by promulgating ...inflammatory lies ....

Abbas packaged these falsehoods with outright bigotry and incitement to murder.

“Al-Aksa Mosque is ours...They [Jews] have no right to defile it with their filthy feet... We bless every drop of blood spilled for Jerusalem, which is clean and pure blood, blood spilled for Allah.”

His adviser, Sultan Abu al-Einein, called upon Fatah members to “carry out widespread public uprisings.”In a Gaza mosque, Sheikh Muhammad Sallah told worshipers:

“Jerusalem is the code word... This is where the soldiers of the Prophet Muhammad are. Brothers, this is why we recall today what Allah did to the Jews.”

Then, brandishing a knife, he raved:

“My brother in the West Bank: Stab!... We don’t want just a single stabber. Oh young men of the West Bank: attack in threes and fours. Some should restrain the victim, while others attack him with axes and butcher knives. Attack them in groups. Cut them into body parts.”

The veil has finally been lifted. Israel is under the onslaught of Islamic religious war.

All the delusional beliefs, that the “Middle East conflict” is about land boundaries and that it could be solved if only Israel would stop building settlements to enable a state of Palestine, now stand exposed for the wishful thinking they always were.

Jews in Israel are not being murdered because their attackers, who could have had a state of their own decades ago, are so “desperate” they have no alternative but to smash rocks onto motorists and cut the throats of Jewish children. They are being slaughtered simply because they are Jews.

All Jews in Israel are “settlers” and thus legitimate targets. And that is because Islam claims as a religious precept that anywhere that has ever been conquered by Muslims must remain Muslim for all time.

The Jews, the only people for whom Israel was ever their national kingdom, must therefore be expunged from their own land and their history denied and falsified, crushed underneath the fantastical edifice of Islamic mythology just like the Jewish Temple lies buried under al-Aksa.

Because the whole point of al-Aksa is to symbolize the dominance of Islam and the subjugation of the Jews, and to deny their claim either to the Temple Mount, the holiest place in Judaism, or to Jerusalem itself.

But the trail of blood does not end at the Palestinian Arabs and the Muslim world. For complicit in this murderous incitement stand the Western media which recycles Arab falsehoods, blood libels and conspiracy theories, presents Israel not as the victim of psychotic violence but as the instigator of injustice and oppression, and thus acts as a lethal echo chamber for the derangement that drives mass murder.

Predictably, the Western media ignored the hundreds of attacks on Israeli Jews these past few weeks. It waited until Israel started killing terrorists. Then it sprang into action to portray the Israelis as brutal oppressors driving helpless Palestinians to desperate measures.

In American and British newspapers, on CNN and the BBC, the focus was on the Palestinians who had been killed with their Israeli victims added as an afterthought.

The New York Times excelled itself in its twisted anti-Israel reporting by peddling an absurd theory – which every expert dismisses as utter rubbish – that the “explosive historical question” was whether the two Jewish Temples had ever stood on the Temple Mount at all.

On BBC TV’s Newsnight, presenter Evan Davies tried to insist that measures Israel was taking to deter further murderous attacks were “reprisals” – in other words, revenge attacks. Then he suggested that the most likely reason why these young, “post-Oslo” Arabs believed Israelis should be killed was that they had been “provoked” by Israel’s behavior.

Such remarks betray total ignorance of the Arab pogroms against Jews, the frenzied butchery and the very same incitement and lies about al-Aksa that have being going on in the Land of Israel for almost a century.

Blood on these hands too...Earlier this week, US Secretary of State John Kerry blamed a “massive increase in settlements” in recent years for stoking Palestinian “frustration” and violence

Even more important than the malice of the media is the part played in Arab incitement by Israel’s supposed friends and allies.

The American, British and European governments give the Palestinian Authority hundreds of millions of dollars every year.A significant proportion of this money is used, through official media and education programs, to promulgate hatred of Jews and Israel and incite terrorist attacks. It is also used to reward mass murder by paying generous “salaries” to convicted terrorists.

American, British and European taxpayers are thus the unwitting accomplices to incitement to murder Jews.

Far from calling the Palestinians to account, Western politicians echo and amplify their mind-bending manipulation of reality. They parrot the lies that the Palestinians have a legitimate claim to the land, that Israel is in illegal occupation, that Jerusalem is not part of Israel at all.

Earlier this week, US Secretary of State John Kerry blamed a “massive increase in settlements” in recent years for stoking Palestinian “frustration” and violence. But since Benjamin Netanyahu became prime minister in 2009, there has been less construction activity in the settlements than since 1995. So not only had Kerry blamed Israel for its own victimization, but he had done so on the basis of a tendentious misrepresentation of reality.

The State Department then accused Israel of using “excessive force” to quell the violence.

Since this force has clearly been restrained and proportionate, this amounted to criticizing Israel for defending itself at all.Tobias Ellwood (Centre), mourns victims of the Bali bomb attack in 2002, but today calls terrorism in Israel "protests and security incidents"

In Britain, the Middle East minister Tobias Ellwood condemned the terrorist attacks in Jerusalem but said the government was “also concerned by the use of force by Israeli security personnel in response to protests and security incidents, which has resulted in several deaths and thousands of injuries.”

“Thousands” of Arab injuries? And since when was terrorist murder “protest”? Ellwood takes us straight back to pre-Israel Palestine, when the British sanitized, sided with and appeased Arab terrorism and punished its Jewish victims. And it is this century- old rewarding of Arab aggression which continues to drive the endless war of extermination against Israel.

Worse horrors are happening elsewhere in the Middle East and developing world.

But over nowhere other than Israel does the Western liberal or government minister or official parade his conscience by sanitizing, excusing or supporting murderous bigotry and demonizing its victims.

In no other conflict does the West indulge aggression and hang its victims out to dry.

Sunday, October 18, 2015

...Abbas has revealed his true face with the current wave of terrorism against Israeli civilians. By any sober assessment, the gambit taken by this "moderate" and "wonderful" man is political suicide and terrible for his image. But in the Palestinian reality -- past and present -- Abbas is doing precisely what is expected of him, by the Palestinian leadership and street alike.

This perhaps explains his conduct, from the beginning of the current wave of violence up to this most recent trend of stabbings. He first engaged in a campaign of vilification against the Jews, explaining how our "filthy feet" were desecrating the Temple Mount.

Then he graduated to outright incitement to violence and lies.

In his speech of lies on Wednesday, Abbas accused Israel of executing a 13-year-old Palestinian boy in cold blood. Incidentally, this boy-terrorist, from the attack in Pisgat Zeev, is alive, kicking, breathing, and eating in an Israeli hospital. The only thing this young terrorist could perhaps complain about is that his meals come with a fork but no knife. Were it not for his deliberate lie, maybe Abbas would have believed the child rose from the dead.

So why is Abbas lying? Perhaps Pinocchio was his childhood hero?

...he is lying because this has always been his way. Has anyone forgotten his doctoral thesis, which was also based on a lie?

The young Holocaust denier is now the old terrorism denier. The man is a chronic liar.

Truth be told, we never expected much of Abbas. True, he did manage to win the support of a small but loud Israeli chorus, but anyone who followed heard him persistently reject the idea of a Jewish state; saw him flee from the room when former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert handed him the map of Israeli concessions; and then not only object but outright negate any possibility of Jews continuing to live in the areas to be handed over to the Palestinians. According to Abbas, however, the Israelis are the racists.

...Perhaps with his comments on Wednesday, Abbas tried creating another Muhammad al-Dura, one more story of a brave boy becoming a shahid. To become a shahid, however, one first has to be dead.

These are difficult days for all Israelis. But let one thing be clear: We are in the right! And therefore we will win, despite the lies.

"Palestinian incitement is to blame for current wave of terrorism ...only way to fight lies is to "tell the truth"...

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses the media, Thursday

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Photo credit: Dudi Vaaknin

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses the media, Thursday

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Photo credit: Dudi Vaaknin

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday said Palestinian incitement is to blame for the wave of terrorism that has swept over Israel in recent weeks....

"The current terror campaign in Israel is a result of continuous Palestinian incitement. First, on the Al-Aqsa mosque and the outrageous claims that we are changing the status quo there or intend to destroy it, and now we have a new big lie."That new big lie is that Israel is executing Palestinians. Yesterday, [Palestinian Authority] President Mahmoud Abbas accused Israel of putting to death, executing, an innocent Palestinian boy. "First of all, he's not dead -- he's alive. Second, he's not innocent -- he tried to kill, murder, knife to death an innocent Israeli youngster, 13 years old, riding a bicycle. This Palestinian terrorist is now being treated in Hadassah hospital in Israel. "The only way that we can fight this big lie and all the other lies that are hurled at Israel and spread in the Palestinian social network and from there to the world, is to tell the truth. This is what we will do today. We expect all our friends and anyone concerned with the facts and the truth to look at these facts, to see the truth and not to draw a false symmetry between Israeli citizens and those who would stab them and knife them to death."

"[Mansara] is hospitalized with us in light-to-moderate condition. He is being well taken care of. From a medical standpoint, I believe we can release him in the coming days."

President Reuven Rivlin said Thursday,

"Truth is not relative. You can't turn murderers into victims and blame the victims for defending themselves. We are a state of law and justice. Israeli democracy is based on law and justice. The State of Israel will never compromise law and justice."...

...Israel was not established to be
another multi-ethnic, multi-cultural liberal democracy.

It was established to be the nation state of the Jewish people, in the
words of the Declaration of Independence, to give expression to the
“natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate...
in their own sovereign state”; and in the words of the national anthem,
to fulfill a “hope two thousand years old, To be a free nation in our
land, The land of Zion...”

To make the claim that the Jewish nature of the state and Jewish
exclusivity over sovereignty is not the overriding hallmark of Israel –
indeed its raison d’etre – is in effect to egregiously defraud, on a
historic scale, all those who contributed, toiled and sacrificed to
found, develop and defend the State of Israel as envisioned in its
founding documents.

It is particularly egregious toward those, who, of their own volition,
left other more affluent, comfortable and secure multi-ethnic,
multi-cultural democracies, to make Israel their home, and to live
under what was alleged to be Jewish sovereignty.

...the first step in formulating an effective policy to contend with
emerging realities is to realize that the current clash is not about
individual rights but collective rights.

The Jews’ collective rights to national sovereignty is under assault by a rival collective – the Arabs.

If the Jews do not prevail in that struggle, not only will they lose
their rights to self-determination as a collective, but the individual
rights of all the inhabitants of Israel (Jews and non-Jews alike) will
be gravely jeopardized.

...Accordingly, Israel must impose a choice on its Arab citizens: to
decide whether they wish to be part of [Israel] a developed, post-industrial
society in which they enjoy the civic freedoms and benefits it bestows
on them, or [to be part of an alternative] national
identity, inherently inimical to their country of residence. They
cannot do both.

It must be clear that

they cannot make demands to replace the founding
ethos of the state with a competing ethos of its enemies;

they cannot
supplant the existing edifice of national symbolism and ceremony with
one that conforms to that of states that strive to eliminate their own;

they cannot continue to exploit the democratic freedoms the Jewish
state extends them, to demolish the Jewish state.

Arab MKs do not have a
“democratic” right to fraternize with the enemy, much less to call for
their kinfolk to rise against their state or it citizens.

Israeli Arabs must either throw their lot in with their county of residence or seek residence elsewhere...

Root of all evil
The origin of much, if not all of Israel’s woes can be traced to the
bitter fruits of the Oslo process, when Israel accepted the legitimacy
of Palestinian statehood, until then considered an almost treasonous
anathema by virtually all Zionist factions.

Acquiescence to Palestinian Arab demands for recognition as an
authentic national entity, with valid claims for a sovereign state of
their own, west of the Jordan, has put Israel in an untenable position.
For the only way to prevent the strategically crucial territory of
Judea-Samaria, earmarked for such a state, falling to radical
jihadists, is for Israel to maintain control over it, thus precluding
the establishment of the state that Israel has committed itself to.

...by endorsing the bogus Palestinian narrative, Israel has by its
own hand sown the foundation for both the myth of occupation and the
seeds of insurrection by Arab Israelis, and for international opprobrium
and the ensuing campaign of delegitimization.

What must be done first is to mount a massive assault on the legitimacy of the Palestinian narrative.

For unless that narrative is delegitimized, even if the current flames
are lowered for a while, they will erupt again and again and again.

It’s hard to find any silver lining in a situation where Palestinians are perpetrating multiple stabbing attacks against Jews every day, and most of the “international community” is siding with the perpetrators.

Yet this dismal situation may finally have produced something Israel desperately needs: An Israeli Arab political leader who represents his community’s sane majority. The 65 percent who are proud to be Israeli, the 55 percent who identify with the Israeli flag, the ones who genuinely want to live in peace with their Jewish neighbors.

For decades, Israeli Arab leadership at the national level has been an unmitigated disaster. The community’s current Knesset members, elected on a joint ticket called the Joint Arab List, span the gamut from the “moderate” Ayman Odeh to the “firebrand” Hanin Zoabi, to borrow the media’s favorite misnomers. The former merely refuses to condemn Palestinian terror, saying, “I cannot tell the nation how to struggle … I do not put red lines on the Arab Palestinian nation.” The latter may face criminal investigation for actively inciting it, having allegedly told a Hamas publication that the current terror needs more “national support,” because “If individual attacks continue without national support, they will be extinguished within the next several days, and therefore hundreds of thousands are needed to start a real intifada.” In between are MKs who spew a wide variety of anti-Israel libels; my personal favorite was Ahmed Tibi’s 2014 op-ed in The Hillclaiming that Israeli Arabs are subject to Jim Crow treatment – signed, without a trace of irony, by his then-title of deputy speaker of the Knesset.

Clearly, this is terrible for Jewish-Arab relations, and the Arab community suffers doubly: Not only do their MKs spend most of their time and effort promoting such libels rather than trying to solve their community’s real problems, the antagonism they generate among the Jewish majority actively hinders solutions. First, it’s hard to lobby the government for, say, better bus service while simultaneously accusing it of apartheid and genocide. Even worse, such rhetoric encourages many Jews to view all Israeli Arabs as enemies to be shunned: After all, Israeli Arabs have overwhelmingly voted to reelect these same MKs for decades, giving this conclusion an obvious logic.

But in recent years, this logic has increasingly been contradicted by other polling data, like the figures I cited in the first paragraph.

Particularly telling was a poll published in February regarding Arab attitudes toward their own MKs.

It showed that 70 percent wanted their MKs to focus on their own community’s socioeconomic problems instead of the Palestinian cause.

Additionally, 61 percent wanted their MKs to join the government, where they would have more influence over such issues, and almost half that figure favored joining regardless of who became prime minister (the Joint Arab List, by contrast, vowed before the election not to join any government). Unsurprisingly, therefore, almost half the respondents weren’t happy with their own MKs.

So why do they keep reelecting them? It’s classic minority identity politics. Whereas the well-integrated Druze vote for, and serve as MKs from, parties across the political spectrum, Israeli Arab integration is still nascent. Consequently, however much they loath their own MKs, most Arabs don’t feel comfortable voting for a non-Arab party; they’re skeptical that Jews could understand or really care about their community’s special problems.

What’s desperately needed, therefore, is home-grown Arab leadership that not only wants to represent the sane Arab majority and advance its integration, but also has the guts and the political power to take on the existing Arab parties. And despite a growing cadre of local leaders who indeed favor coexistence over confrontation, none had been willing to publicly challenge the national leadership – until Nazareth Mayor Ali Salem erupted on the stage this week.

Last March, Salem ousted Nazareth’s long-time mayor in a landslide, winning 61.5 percent of the vote in an election with record turnout of 83.8 percent. The former mayor, a Christian, belonged to the abovementioned Ayman Odeh’s party and toed its anti-Israel line. Salem, a Muslim, also began his political career in that party, but later quit in disgust and ran for mayor as an independent. The fact that he was both willing and able to challenge the Arab political establishment proved a harbinger of things to come.

This week, when Odeh visited Nazareth, Salem confronted his inflammatory behavior head-on – and on live TV.

“Get out of here! Go back to Haifa, and stop destroying our city,” Salem yelled. “Jews don’t come here anymore because of you! … You’re burning the world down. … Shut up and get out!”

When Odeh, embarrassed, demanded that the television crew stop filming, Salem promptly demanded the opposite; he wanted his remarks to be widely heard. And lest there be any doubt, he gave several follow-up interviews reiterating his views.

“I blame the [Israeli Arab] leaders...They are destroying our future, they are destroying coexistence. We need to find a way to live together. We cannot fight like this. We are damaging ourselves.”

... “It infuriates me that Arab politicians come here, incite violence, and leave us to clean up their mess … We invest a great deal in coexistence and tourism. We want to develop our city. I want peace and quiet. … We used to have thousands of Jews and tourists visit Nazareth over the weekends. They don’t visit anymore. This seriously hurts our image and our livelihood, and we won’t allow it.”

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